


hello, my love

by anistarrose



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: (in a way), Alternate Universe, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, TAZ November Celebration, but I like to think it's skewed towards comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27689947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anistarrose/pseuds/anistarrose
Summary: Even when Barry awakens without his memories, no one else around but an undead stranger, certain things are still inevitable.
Relationships: Barry Bluejeans/Lup
Comments: 7
Kudos: 22





	hello, my love

**Author's Note:**

> For the [TAZ November Celebration](https://taznovembercelebration.tumblr.com) on tumblr, specifically a late contribution to the day 19 prompt, "established relationship" (in perhaps the least conventional sense of the term possible).
> 
> (there are brief mentions of nudity, as is inevitable with Barry's particular Situation, but not in detail or anything)

_It — it feels wrong to say I’ll miss you, but —_

_No, I get it. It’s gonna be so fucking weird, and I — I know it won’t last forever —_

_Okay, I — I can’t do it like this. Not if we make it sad. Lup, I love you so much, you know you’re the light of my life and undeath…_

_Of course, babe._

_…and I’ll see you soon._

The world Barry wakes up in is tinted green, obscuring everything besides a few ill-defined silhouettes. His limbs are numb at first, but as… _red sparks?_ run down his arms, the feeling returns as a strange sort of weightless sensation, like he’s floating beneath the surface of a lake.

A few bubbles escape from his nose, and oh _shit_ , he really _is_ submerged in something. Before he can even wonder which way is up, his hand grazes something that immediately tears away — and with it drains out the mystery green liquid, which he’s just going to _pretend_ is water. He staggers onto the floor of a cave, blinking rapidly as he adjusts to the light. It’s _definitely_ a cave; he can feel the cool air on his skin and the bare rock beneath his feet — so why is it so _bright?_

The answer arrives in the form of a voice, whose owner becomes a little more visible to him with each blink of his eyes.

“Care for a towel? Actually, I’m giving you one whether you want it or not, ‘cause if you die of hypothermic shock after everything we’ve gone through to get here, that’s just gonna be awkward.”

She’s beautiful, he knows before he can truly see evidence of the fact. There’s so much _care_ in her voice that her joke can’t disguise, and the towel she slings over Barry’s shoulders is warm, but not as warm as her hands. This feels like the correct moment to freak out over being, as far as Barry can tell, _completely buck naked_ aside from the generous towel gift — but instead, his attention is captivated by his companion, who in complete contrast to himself, seems to be more clothes than body as she comes into focus.

It doesn’t feel right to say she’s _wearing_ her red robe — it’s more like she _embodies_ it, as it moves subtly to indicate her posture, her emotions, rather than to conceal them. What little of her that _isn’t_ a robe is ablaze, but not violently — if Barry only had one word to describe her, he would simply say _warm_. 

Her eyes are negative space amidst the flames, darkness where one would expect unbridled light, but there’s nothing sinister about them — more of a fascination, if anything, evident as she locks her gaze with Barry’s.

He’s been staring, hasn’t he? And she’s been staring at _him_. 

He expects the sheer _embarrassment_ of this whole situation to catch up to him any second, but it just doesn’t hit him. There’s nothing uncomfortable about sharing the room with her.

“Hi,” he says, giving a little wave. “I don’t know how I got here, but… I like your robe.”

She bursts into laughter, illuminating the cave in an ever-changing pattern of red, orange, and pink — and Barry can’t help but wonder if there are a few tears in the mix too, given how hard it is to _tell_ on a face made out of fire.

“Oh, babe. Oh, _Barry_. Of _course_ you would.” She brings a spectral finger to Barry’s face, evaporating a droplet of water with a single touch, but the warmth that rushes to Barry’s cheeks has nothing to do with the temperature of her hands, only her touch itself. “Sit tight for a second, babe. I’m gonna grab something you’ll like.”

 _Babe?_ He’s paralyzed for a few seconds, the word echoing in his head as she floats across the room, sifting through piles of scrolls, jeans, and miscellaneous other items that couldn’t be further from naturally occurring in caves. _Does she know me? Does she_ like _me?_

He’s finished drying himself off by the time she returns, holding a second red robe — and a corporeal one, no less. She drapes it over Barry’s shoulders, and he slips his arms into the sleeves without thinking twice. 

It’s cozy, but something about looking down at himself _wearing_ it brings a fuzziness to his mind that’s not nearly as comfortable as the fuzziness of the fabric. He focuses his gaze on the ghostly woman instead — who makes his mind turn to static in her own right, but in a way that’s more than balanced out by the joy of just looking at her.

“See, we both look good in red,” she says with a wink, and Barry feels the temperature of his face rise another degree or two. He’ll wind up on fire like she is, at this rate. “You’ll want to sit down. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

“Yeah, I can imagine. Um, I think… I might be just a _tiny_ bit amnesiac? Like, just a _little_. ‘Cause I know who _I_ am, but you sound like you know me, and I don’t know you.” 

He takes a deep breath, and decides there’s no harm in admitting what she’s surely already noticed. He’s been too confused to try and be subtle. “Also, I definitely just fell in love with you a couple orders of magnitude faster than I thought I’d ever fall in love with anyone, so that’s, uh… cool, but weird?”

The lower half of her face brushes his forehead — not quite solid, but not unpleasant — and he realizes just as soon as it’s over that it must’ve been a ghostly kiss.

“We were gonna _ease_ you into the ‘us being in love and you losing your memories’ thing,” she tells him with a chuckle, and Barry’s too giddy to even wonder what she means by _we_. “Lay out the groundwork first. We should’ve known better.”

“My bad?” Barry blurts out, and that makes her laugh even harder, until embers are dripping from her eyes like glistening teardrops.

“Oh my god. This must — this must be so _much_ for you, babe, so much to _take in_. How are you _doing_ it? How are you — taking this so in-stride, and still sounding so much like _you_ , I mean?”

“I mean… I wouldn’t know,” Barry admits. It _is_ so much to take in, and he knows that if he’d woken up here all alone, with no idea how he’d arrived, then he’d be a _mess_ by now — and not the hopeless romantic kind. As it is, he’s holding it together, trying not to think about his headache and taking comfort in the more pleasant of realizations — but he’s still adrift and disoriented, clinging to a figure he can’t remember his reason for trusting. “It — it doesn’t quite feel _real_ , to be honest? Like, I — I believe you, I believe that I loved you — but it’s the _forgetting_ that gets me…”

He can see himself falling in love, but he can’t see himself falling in this kind of love _quickly_. This soaring feeling in his heart could only be propelled by _years_ of incremental intimacy, years that he can remember none of, years that don’t exist according to the static roaring inside his head. “How could I _forget_ all this?”

She hugs him in a way unlike any hug he can remember, overlapping with the space he occupies until he’s engulfed in gentle flames, and the threads of her robe feel like they’re what’s doing the hugging, having reformed and rewoven themselves around his arms. Not knowing how else to embrace her back, Barry wraps his arms around his own chest, and feels her presence grow warmer still.

He can just barely wrap his mind around the thought that the warmth coming from his own chest might be borne of subconscious familiarity.

“You still have a big obvious head-over-heels crush on me, don’tcha?” she teases, her laughter surrounding him. “Nothing can make you forget _that_.”

“Yeah, every version of me’s a hopeless romantic. We’ve got that,” Barry admits. “But I — I don’t even remember your _name_ —” 

He would know it if he heard it, he’s sure; it’s so close to the tip of his tongue that he’d probably blurt it out instinctively, if only he didn’t always _think_ so hard about his words before saying them. It’s so tantalizingly _close_ , and he wants to know it again, to _say_ it again, more than any other favor the universe could grant him, and doesn’t the universe owe him at least _this_ much —

“Well, I know how to fix that.” She withdraws from the hug, remaining at his side. “And I _think_ it’ll help if you hear it from _yourself_ — if you hear all the truth we can give you, that is.”

She extends a hand, and a simple golden coin flies across the room to land in her palm. It’s embossed with a vaguely familiar rune that Barry can’t translate, but his mind _really_ starts to reel when she places the coin in his hand, and he hears his own voice emanate from it:

_Your name is Barry Bluejeans. You are afraid of the dark. Your very favorite thing in the world is swimming in very cold water on a very hot day, but you cannot remember who taught you to swim, or why you’re always so much more scared of the dark at the end of the year._

_The beautiful undead woman next to you is named Lup, and as much as it pains you to realize, you have forgotten her, too. There are fundamental truths about the world, about your loved ones, and about yourself that you have been blocked from comprehending — you’ve had more stolen from you than you realize, and there are very few ways to undo it._

_Barry, I’m you just moments ago, and I’m about to forget so much. But right now, I remember, and Lup can help_ you _remember too._

Another voice joins the recording — Lup herself, who sounds just slightly different than she has today, just a little less burdened.

 _If you haven’t guessed from how this nerd talks about me_ — Her words are punctuated by an affectionate grumble from Barry — _we’ve been dating longer than you can imagine. I wish we could just —_

 _You also can’t remember that Lup’s as much of a nerd as you are, Barry,_ his past self interrupts. _You met because you were_ both _nerds._

 _Oh, come on, you’ll still be smart enough to figure that one out by yourself! But like I was saying, we had a hell of an epic love story I wish we could just_ tell _you — but you wouldn’t be able to understand much of it, and you’d get a headache trying._

 _So,_ Barry adds, _we thought about what would be the next best thing. And I think we got a pretty good idea._

A classical music piece fades in, beginning with a piano but quickly adding a violin. Barry can’t put a title or a context to the tune, but he recognizes it from the first note and starts tearing up by the third. His fingers tap out a pattern in sync with the piano part before he even realizes they’re doing it, and when he closes his eyes to let the music wash over him, he realizes that the Lup of the present, the Lup at his side, is almost imperceptibly humming along with the violin. 

“You’ll remember this again,” she promises, choking up, when the tune eventually fades. “One day.”

Already, the music has stirred ghosts of memories, fleeting emotions, that Barry can _almost_ imagine in context — quiet moments, private conversations that no one could rip away from him because no one else but Lup ever knew they’d happened — and that day feels _close_ , reassuringly so.

Like him falling for Lup again, it feels like an inevitability.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading, comments/[reblogs](https://anistarrose.tumblr.com/post/635618024720875520/hello-my-love-ao3-a-slightly-late) are welcomed as always! I might play in the space of this AU again, who knows :)


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